When Noah was faced with the task of stocking the ark, it was a fairly simple business: two of everything, mate, and don t bother with the unicorns. In fact, considering Noah was most likely a hapless Bronze Age farmer trying to survive a regional flood, it was probably even simpler. The situation more likely boiled down to as many goats as you can force on board, plus a couple of cows and maybe a donkey if it ll fit. Easy. By contrast, Frontier Developments task, in choosing what animals to include in Planet Zoo, seems daunting – even if it did involve less in the way of physically manoeuvring goats onto a raft.
There are, after all, very very many types of animal in the world. Species totals between one and two million get chucked around all the time, but these come with a big caveat: however you choose to slice things, a big chunk of these totals will always comprise beetles that only an expert could distinguish from other, very similar beetles. So with that in mind, let’s slash the total right down to just the number of species currently kept in zoos and aquariums, and only in the US. Alas, we still end up with 6,000+, according to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. That’s a lot of animals. To find out how Frontier got from here, to the list of 76 animals in Planet Zoo at launch (there are 80 now), I had a bit of a duck-billed chatypus with PZ s senior artist Lisa Bauwens, and game director Piers Jackson.